April 24th
Although the forecasts for today included heavy rainfall, the day started sunny and warm. We took advantage of the good weather and went for a walk to the town’s centre. Rhoon looks like a little agricultural town, not at all like a part of the big conglomerate Rotterdam, just a few stops away by metro.
We saw a measuring point (Trig point for Federal Triangulation) on the way to Rhoon. The land register puts these measuring points in the ground for the land surveyor. They use these metal marks as reference points with which they can map areas like where the roads, plots and building sites are, or measure any deformations in buildings or objects. We gave a lecture once on geo data (geometrical data about where things are positioned) and a guy from the land register who was in the audience said that they indeed put those measuring point in the ground, but that they have lost more than half of them. They simply don’t know where they are anymore. To find out where they are they had issued a game. If you find one, you can upload the coordinates to a special geocaching website:(https://www.geocaching.nl/overzichtskaart-rd-meetpunten/). But this one is so rusty, you can’t decipher the number anymore.
By the way, the have lost a few hundred border marks as well. Anyone up for a new game, Germany and Belgium perhaps?
We did some groceries, and discovered a lovely little chocolaterie halfway back to the boat. The fragrance of melting chocolate was wafting into the streets. We couldn’t resist the temptation and we stopped there for a coffee and pastry.
There is a washing machine at the marina of Rhoon, and it was high time to do the laundry. Every marina has a different washing machine and a different system, so you always have to figure out how things work first. And doing the laundry in a marina is also different than at home. You set a timer, so that you can be back at the machine when the program ends. It has happened that if you are too late some else comes along and takes your clothes out. That wouldn’t be a problem if they put it neatly in a basket, but it happens that they just dump it on the floor. Sometimes other people even stop the program halfway and chuck your clothes out, because they are in a hurry and think they consequently have the right to go first. And it has even happened that items disappear. Maybe someone was in dire need of socks? That’s why doing the laundry as a liveaboard is planned with military precision.
Another liveaboard in the marina kindly explained the system and warned us for the presence of ruthless people that stop the program halfway. Apparently it also happens in Rhoon.
But there were no culprits lurking about, eager to disrupt the washing cycle this time allowing us to continue without further ado to the drying stage. Some of the clothes like T-shirts we don’t put in the dryer because you don’t want to end up with Barbie sized shirts. And the convenient thing of a boat is that you always have enough washing lines in the form of life lines to hang stuff on. It was however forecasted to rain, so we kept an eye on the increasingly darkening sky. Of course, in the end we still had to rush to get it all inside when the rain finally came before it got wet again…